


Feed His Grave (Keep Him Sleeping)

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Akudama Drive (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Gen, Introspection, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, but I'm delighted that's an official tag ahahaha, ghost story, well.... Cutthroat is a ghost
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-18 05:15:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28737843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Ever since she grew up and made her way to that dust-and-crackling-neon city, the Ordinary Person was told one thing: leave red flowers at Cutthroat’s grave on the thirteenth of every month, or else he’ll get restless.
Relationships: Cutthroat & Ordinary | Swindler (Akudama Drive)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 21





	Feed His Grave (Keep Him Sleeping)

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there!!! I hope you enjoy this story, if you read it. :D I wrote it for Cutthroat's birthday, a while back, and have been holding on to it!!! Finally throwing it into the world hehehe. I'm sorry for any and all mistakes I might've made/any things I could've done better. The line featuring graffiti imagery was definitely inspired by the Butcher's Block season of "Channel Zero," which I was watching around when I started drafting this, and also the movie "Candyman." 
> 
> Thank you!!! I hope you're staying safe and having a wonderful day.

Ever since she grew up and made her way to that dust-and-crackling-neon city, the Ordinary Person was told one thing: leave red flowers at Cutthroat’s grave on the thirteenth of every month, or else he’ll get restless. If you forget to buy roses or poppies, tulips or hyacinths, then bring anything red, anything at all. Smear red paint across his silky white marble headstone; leave crinkly red candy wrappers pinned like helpless struggling moths under a stone. 

Cutthroat’s grave always seemed cluttered and sticky-red until the next morning, when every time – without anybody seeing how it happened, of course – all the offerings would’ve been swallowed into the earth. This gravedirt was the thirsty kind, see; the flowers never even had time to rot. 

If Cutthroat got restless, he might pry up the boards of his ruined old coffin, people said — if Cutthroat got restless, he might come and find still-warm screaming redness all for himself, from inside somebody’s unwitting veins. He swayed around on paper-white corpse feet, and even if you heard him coming... even if he sang little nursery rhymes, even if he called your name ( _but how did he know your name? You, out of everyone here in the city?_)... there would never be time enough to run. 

The Ordinary Person heard that Cutthroat had killed a thousand people at least while he was alive; she heard he stood with his hands spread, longing and beatific, like he was in a church with liquid multicolor stained-glass light drifting over him, and let red blood shower his waiting face. Some sort of unholy baptism, again and again. Cutthroat would haunt that city for nine hundred and sixty-seven years, or until judgment day, whichever came first. To reach his grave, people had to pass through the rows of cracked stone angels surrounding him, leaning in like they were gathered to keep him sleeping. Like they might fight him back into the dirt with cold stone wings, if they had to, and a hollow knowing in their unblinking eyes. 

Cutthroat was a myth, around those parts: he was a bogeyman with laughing purple eyes, whenever people graffiti-painted him on subway underpasses. Smooth white hair, smile flecked with blood, eyes that seemed to see what you’d look like with your throat slit, that promised to love you only for a little while, love you until your blood stopped fountaining in the air. But once, before all of this, Cutthroat _had_ been a human man, and January thirteenth was his birthday. That was why everyone left gifts for him the way they did, on the thirteenth — maybe they’d tried that trick in January alone, at first, and once a year had just never been enough. The Ordinary Person shivered, thinking that, and considered how gifts given out of fear were lonelier than any other gifts she could think of. How nine hundred and sixty-seven years — or until judgement day — was such an inhuman long time. 

Cutthroat had been twenty-seven, when he died… that much was remembered, at least… but so many records of the man he was before he became a force of nature, a killer, a stranger, had been cleansed from the city library. The Ordinary Person knew that, because she kept imagining him as something terrifying she might find at the foot of her bed every night and... and she needed her sleep, didn’t she? So she combed through everything the library had about Cutthroat, trying to convince herself his grislier stories couldn’t be true. They were too over-the-top, obviously; they were fairytales told to keep people off the crooked streets at night. But outside of funny superstitions and Cutthroat cryptid sightings — outside of ghost tours and the knowledge that, once, this man had been executed burning like Lucifer cast down from Heaven, there was almost nothing left. Just descriptions of gore and all those mangled things left behind wherever he went. Crime scene sketches. Stuff like that.

The man’s sins had lived on so much longer than anything else about him. Maybe if he’d been born a little later on, someone could’ve gotten him help; maybe he could’ve had red-on-red hellish landscape painting in galleries, nowadays, or a sibling’s great-great-great grandchild or whatever who still claimed him as their own. Maybe. Or maybe not. It was sad, anyway. Nobody won, in this kind of story.

It was January now, and the Ordinary Person bought takoyaki for herself and for the restless ghost everybody fed red flowers to keep alone in the ground. Maybe she shouldn’t have done it, but she did. If thinking of him as a human would help put this haunting in perspective, then she’d try to think of him as a guy serving centuries in solitary confinement without any proper visiting days, or family phone calls, or opportunity to change. The Ordinary Person drew red flowers on the takoyaki carry-out box, to be safe. She sat and ate by Cutthroat’s grave while other people dropped off their sacrifices, and before she left she muttered, “Happy birthday,” to the cold ground. She said, “I don’t know if you’re really all the scary things people say you are, but it must be awful haunting your old bones for so long. Never satisfied. Always hungry. I wonder how many of your nine hundred and sixty-seven years here are up?”

And then she turned to leave. It was cold, after all, and people had been looking at her funny this whole time. A voice — or something that used to be a soft, tender voice, mind you, but was something else entirely now, like sound reflected impossibly in a mirror — may have echoed, “Must be awful,” back to her. Or maybe not. With the dead, it can be difficult to tell, until all of a sudden it isn’t. 

Soon, it started to rain. The Ordinary Person held her coat tighter around her shoulders; glanced behind her, past the angels. It was sad that the red paint on Cutthroat’s grave didn’t seem to be dripping clean. It was sad that she could almost hear, “I’ve always loved the rain,” just at the edge of her mind. “Come back sometime, won’t you?”

The stone angels leaned in closer, unless they didn’t. The rain fell harder, turning the graveyard paths to mud.

The Ordinary Person _would_ come back here, by the thirteenth of next month, at least. 


End file.
